Learn about choosing a clinic

A great clinic isn’t just one that can give you effective treatment, it’s one with compassionate staff, clear pricing, seamless administrative processes and exceptional emotional support. Find out more about how to choose a clinic, preparing for your appointment and what to do if something goes wrong.

How to choose a clinic

If you’re paying for treatment yourself you’ll want to make sure you’re choosing the right clinic, but with so many to choose from deciding which one best meets your needs can feel a bit overwhelming.

It may be tempting to rely solely on success rates but the reality is that most clinics are broadly all as good as each other – small differences in rates are usually down to the different types of patients treated.

Finding out how other patients and our inspectors rate the clinic, the clinic’s opening hours and location and whether they have a female doctor could all be equally important factors to consider.

Data we publish

We collect data from fertility clinics and publish much of it on our website, including individual clinic success rates.

Individual clinic rates can't tell you how likely you are to have a baby. Look instead at the national rate on Choose a Fertility Clinic or read our Fertility Trends report.

If you’re looking for clinic data, head to the bottom of this page to search for a clinic and view: how patients rate the clinic; how inspectors rate the clinic; pregnancy and birth rates from different fertility treatments, multiple birth rates and waiting times for donated eggs, sperm or embryos.

We look after data from clinics about patients and treatments very carefully.

Things to consider when choosing a clinic

What to look for in a clinic

Struggling to choose a clinic? Let us help with our tips on what to look for in a great clinic.

Consent to treatment

Giving your informed consent is a vital part of your treatment. It affects how long you can store your embryos for, what happens in the event of your death and, in some cases, who's considered to be a legal parent to your child.

Prepare for an appointment

Problems at the clinic

Thankfully it's rare that patients have serious problems with their clinic. However, if your clinic makes a mistake, you have a complaint or you want to change clinics, you can find out more about handling problems on this page.

By choosing a clinic on our website you can view treatments, opening hours, patient ratings, success rates and more all in one place. Plus every clinic is licensed so you know they’re safe too.

Why are there different success rates?

There are several different ways of presenting success – you could show births per cycle of treatment, births per embryo transferred, births per egg collection and so on.

This means your clinic might give you a different success rate from the one you can find on our website but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re wrong. Using the data on our website you can view success rates for different clinics safe in the knowledge that they’ve been calculated in exactly the same way. Please note, we don't publish figures for clinics performing very small numbers of cycles as the results can be misleading.

The trouble with comparing success rates

It’s extremely difficult to compare clinic success rates fairly. This is because success rates depend on the patients being treated and the reason for their infertility.

In addition, some clinics specialise in treating people with certain types of infertility or older women who are less likely to be successful, which will impact on their rate. That’s why we recommend you consider all the issues that matter to you – from opening hours to counselling provision – when choosing a clinic and not rely solely on the data.

Making sense of reliability ranges

When we present a clinic’s success rates, we also present what we call a ‘reliability range.’
The reliability range is designed to show how confident we are that a clinic will repeat their success rates in the future – generally the larger the clinic, the more confident we can be and the narrower the range is.
This is because if a clinic has performed a large number of cycles then chance events won’t have a big impact on their overall success rate. However, the success rates of small clinics could change dramatically if they had just 10 more successes or failures. We therefore use the reliability range to show you the range of possible success rates a clinic might have in the future.

Ready?

Use our Choose a Fertility Clinic service to find the clinic that’s right for you. If you’re an NHS patient, use it to research the clinic you’ll be having treatment at.

Choose a Fertility Clinic is the only tool that publishes comparable information about all fertility clinics in the UK. That’s because we collect data from clinics about all the treatments they carry out. And we inspect each clinic at least every two years to check their standards.